THE VIRTUAL CULTIVATED PLANT HERBARIUM

Abstract

The RHS Herbarium at Wisley is the foremost herbarium focussing on the taxonomy of cultivated plants. The collection has been actively developed since the 1970s and now numbers over 80,000 specimens. However, most users of the herbarium are not local to Wisley and space in the herbarium for outside researchers is limited. Furthermore, many potential users are unaware of the value of such a resource. To make this collection available to a much wider audience, a programme to digitise the specimens was begun in 2010. To date over 9000 specimens have been scanned and are stored on the RHS central servers in London. As part of the programme, the RHS Herbarium was accepted into partnership of the Global Plants Initiative. Consequently, the types and nomenclatural standard specimens held by the RHS are available through the JSTOR Plant Science website to partner institutions. A number of problems were faced that are particular to cultivated plant specimens. The future of the digitisation programme at Wisley and plans to broaden the concept of a virtual cultivated plant herbarium beyond the RHS Herbarium are discussed.